So I just started writing my public interest paper yesterday in class and it got me all excited because I thought about all of the possible topics I could talk about. One of the topics that popped into my head (probably because I had just read a post by one of my classmates on the subject) was Teen Drinking. In class we read an article about binge drinking in colleges and our group discussed the problem together during that time. We came to somewhat of an agreement: that binge drinking occurred because the alchohol was illegal. MADD was the leading cause of raising the drinking age to 21, but what was the point of that? Wasn't the driver that killed that one boy in his 40's? What was the significance of 21? Does 3 years really make that much of a difference?
I think that this is a problem of inexperience: if young adults don't know how to drink they will abuse it and go overboard. But, if they learn how to drink and are able to manage how much they drink and know their limits early in life there wouldn't be this huge dilema. Take Europe, for example (although I believe it was Cameron who pointed out Europe has a slight problem with young drinkers abusing alchohol as well), where children are given alchohol (mostly wine, I suppose) from a young age and learn to drink it when they are still adolescents. This provides them not only with the opportunity to try different forms of alchohol and develop a better pallet for the varying levels of quality of alchohol so they can appreciate it more, but also gives them a safe environment to learn their limits and become responsible drinkers.
Teenagers in America have a severe problem with drinking, mostly because it is illegal. If drinking alchohol was legal, the thrill would be gone (except for actually drinking the alchohol), so most of the hype would disappear. It's the same with drugs, in my opinion: the fact that they are illegal makes kids want to do them more because they are "off limits". Like I said in class, in a smoking movie I saw in biology a young teenager said (and I believe correctly), "If you tell teenagers not to do it they're going to want to do it more". So, taking this to heart, drinking is only special and "cool" because teenagers know it's against the rules. They want to rebel against the world that they feel is unfair, and they take this opportunity to do that. If it weren't a big deal to drink, fewer young people would feel inclined to abuse it.
So why can't/doesn't our government address this issue? I hope that more is done to fix internal problems in our country and less is done to create problems abroad when the new president, whomever he or she may be, takes office in 2009.
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Also, in Europe, they have clubs with age restrictions such as 16-18 and they won't let older people into the clubs because it's a young people's club (and they still sell alcohol). Same goes for a younger person trying to get into an older people's club. They don't restrict the ages because of alcohol, but because they want it to be a safer environment for the teens. I think that this is far superior to the system we have now, which still lets in all ages over 18 (and even some clubs you can get in if your younger), and where we have things like date rape happening very often.
Good report idea!
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